Oh my, the problems that occurred in post production were excruciating. Besides my group and I thinking that it would be a great idea to finish editing on the day of our presentation to the panel, we did not actually have some of the audio that we recorded, some of the audio we did have got deleted, and we realised many, many continuity issues that occurred when filming.
Let’s begin with the continuity errors, shall we? Essentially, we had no continuity. From the eye-lines being completely out-of-whack and unfixable in post-production to the lighting differed immensely, these were just the start of our problems. The visual aesthetics of this became completely messed up and these errors that we did not take into consideration at all had ruined the pilot all by itself.
Now, moving on to sound: IT WAS HORRIBLE. For one, we couldn’t actually do the sound for one section as it was not available to us, and therefore we had to use the sound from the camera. This was particularly bad, as you could hear the buzzing noise from the building – and loudly – so much that you could barely hear what the actors were saying.
On the day of the presentation when we were finalising editing, I was attempting to link up what audio was available to me with their visuals, and for some reason part of the audio deleted from the first scene and I was not able to recover it. Therefore, after a mental break down and a half, we had decided that we were unable to show the whole of the pilot (only the part where most of the audio was okay) for our presentation to the panel.
Ultimately, what I believe we have gained from this experience is to:
- Check continuity in eye-lines and lighting;
- Thoughroughly assess the sound at the location;
- Make sure everyone brings a hard drive so they are able to have all of the footage and audio;
- Make sure we begin (and finish) editing far before the due date.
This experience was yet another learning curve, but I am once again happy that it happened when it did, and was therefore able to gain positive feedback from the panel in how to stop these things from happening in future.
